marklv -> RE: WiF Master Edition (1/21/2008 1:36:33 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets Programming, like many other jobs has specialists and generalists. If you specialize, you can be very valuable ($) as long as the demand exceeds the supply for that specialty. The highest risk in programming is to specialize is some area that later becomes obsolete. Then no one wants to hire you, much less pay you the salary you were used to when your specialty was all the rage. Specialized skills are also pretty much useless unless you are part of a team, so you better have good interpersonal skills. Most importantly, the knowledge required in the field of programming grows every year - with detris falling off and forming a wake behind (pun intended). "Adapt or die." Or as Dylan said: "He who is not busy being born, is busy dying." The net is extraordinary growth in the requisite knowledge base if you want to be all things to all people. To do so, you would spend all your time learning and have no time left for doing. Hence, inevitably there are going to be areas where you have to rely on specialists. They can do tasks in their field of specialty at least an order of magnitude faster then generalists. Think in terms of 2 rather boring hours versus 2 weeks of pain and suffering. I chose to specialize in a few areas, mostly related to mathematical simulation models, artificial intelligence, and graphical user interface. That was feasible in 1980 but the fields have grown so much, I am far from being a specialist in any of them now. The skill set that serves me best these days are my project management skills (MBA 1976) combined with my predisposition to puzzle solving (from birth apparently - "How do I get out of here? How can I get back in?"). Oh, and writing. Being able to express ideas clearly in the printed word is very valuable almost everywhere. Verbally too, of course. And the ever present need to get along with others. But I am drifting, time to get back to air mission code. Well, I am a test analyst/manager in the UK, and while this used to pay very well for relatively little technical skill, now it is a specialisation that is becoming increasingly outsourced, and therefore devalued. So I have now moved to pure test management, but this involves a lot more hassle, project management skills, and dealing with, sometimes, difficult people. Fortunately I am working in a huge military project, which is long term and pretty safe, but once it ends it could get difficult to find good work. IT had declined sharply since the end of the dotcom boom and 9/11. And there is massive downward pressure on salaries, as the outsourcing to India craze keeps going.
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